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In 2012, director Joshua Oppenheimer directed a film called The Act of Killing. In the course of the documentary, Oppenheimer interviews perpetrators of the 1960s mass killings of alleged communists and those who opposed the New Order regime in Indonesia. There’s a paralyzing, depressing candidness with which the killers (many of whom at the time still retained power of some sort decades later) describe the killings they committed, sometimes citing violent movies as inspiration, and in how they go about casting people to re-enact the murders. It’s as though they’re trying to evoke memories of a better time through recollection and fondness defined by bloodshed and spiritually recreating it. In juxtaposing this candidness with both reality and surreality, the film makes the case that the people who carry out such horrified actions are not monsters in the abstract, but human beings. Given the right circumstances (such as backing by Western governments), they will manifest, flourish, and linger. We cannot say “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” when they most certainly know what they did, and seem to celebrate it.
But therein lies an important distinction – staring in the face of evil is not the same as condoning evil. It’s the kind of space that allows media to depict truly unpleasant subjects in ways that, at least hopefully, demonstrate a clear difference between what occurs in the text versus the intent behind the action. Takopii’s Original Sin, as directed by Iino Shinya, relies on its audience understanding this distinction and navigating through the gross inhumanity of everything inflicted by responding with revulsion. When Marina laughs at Shizuka’s expense, or Azuma’s mother spews such disparaging words of unacceptance, or Shizuka’s lips finally curl into a sincere smile as something horrifying transpires, the show does not argue that these are good things. If it truly wanted to advocate that violence was the ultimate solution to the characters’ problems, it wouldn’t spend so much of its time having those same characters disgustingly and grotesquely falling further and further into their own deep, dark whirlpools. For the viewer, it’s violence absent catharsis. Every punch, slash, self-affliction, and emotional manipulation makes the characters wholly commit to their own atrocities, all while making them mistakenly think that salvation lies at the other end of the tunnel vision.
(Credit to Saitou Keiichirou, the director for Bocchi the Rock! and Frieren for the animation clip, and Iida Yuichiro for the key animation frame. Shinya’s direction frequently calls for warped perspective and a consistent tonal unease, a visual manifestation of how the narrative keeps the children in its uncertain center)
It’s not difficult to understand why these children would internalize to such an extent that this is the case, as such an ideology is not born from nowhere. With the overwhelming presence of violence in the children’s everyday lives from those who are supposed to take care of them, a seemingly immutable truth is conveyed: violence is the response to circumstances beyond a character’s control, a survival strategy born from malice and for the purposes of self-preservation. It is witnessed through the parents seeing the world they want to have crash all around them and not knowing any healthier ways to channel that frustration beyond the end of their sociologically stunted fist or broken glass bottle. Violence, however revolting, allows them to have a degree of control over something markedly more helpless. It is not that the children are the actual cause of the adults’ problems (or in the context of Marina, Shizuka as the cause), but it’s that they’re within the closest proximity. It’s mapping a despairingly simple solution onto a complex problem, and that by doing so, things supposedly don’t have to be so bad. Inflict violence on another person who is reasonably within your reach, and it makes you, your convictions, and your life better.
(Credit to Kojima Takashi. The adults in Takopii’s Original Sin are always positioned as the main instigators for the children’s worldview and destructive impulses, instilling that violence against those who are weaker than yourself is somehow an acceptable solution for problems that they cannot necessarily control)
Takopii, the adorable little pink octopus alien, bears witness to this deliberately misapplied, abjectly horrific simplicity. Themselves a simple creature with a mystifying sense of misunderstanding human concepts or morality, their initial mission to help Shizuka smile (unable to because of the victimization by Marina) primes the audience for their subsequent bludgeoning. The disquietingly naïve outlook Takopii has deliberately contrasts with the cold reality that Shizuka lives in every day, situating the story tonally in a continuous suspense. Laughter that the show produces tends to be more from discomfort and foreboding than finding something genuinely funny, admittedly a small levity.
Takopii’s involvement is the ultimate glue that keeps the story’s cohesion. As Takopii violates their own cultural taboos to help Shizuka survive, they themselves embody the perspective of the outsider, taking it upon themselves to makes sense of the seeming senselessness of it all, like a news anchor inevitably asking the same old question about the newest American school shooting. They react with panic and horror, experiencing for themselves how far gone some of these characters are in their violence-inducing worldview. Without such responses, it would be easy for the series to fall into its abyss and never recover. In part because the show on the whole is animated so vividly, even in moments where something is implied off-screen, Takopii’s Original Sin comes dangerously close to poor taste, excessive purely for the sake of shock. The bluntness of each blow (and the affect on the dramaturgy) is held back from truly unobstructed impact by Takopii’s own sense of the conflicts. Almost Brechtian in how it forces the audience to see this particular world as it is, it makes the case that each child and Takopii is a multifaceted creation of their environment, taking on new “roles” in the story as time is reset or as Takopii’s understanding grows ever thornier. Even down to its seemingly magical resolution, the final intent is not about fostering hopelessness, but demonstrating that it is precisely through moving through alienating action as witnesses that empathic connection is even possible.
(Credit to Oshima Touya. Takopii’s refusal to give up and always find some kind of way to help or understand, even as circumstances get increasingly more dire or drastic and they themselves feel fear and panic, stops the story from falling off the cliff altogether, even if some of their ideas are misguided because they’re missing key pieces)
In that spirit of empathic connection, Takopii’s Original Sin is not a contest of “who suffered more / who should I feel more sorry for” or whose punishment is “deserved / undeserved.” The questions may have a way of unintentionally sneaking up because of the show’s overall structure. The anime’s (and the original manga’s) short length simultaneously lets the story maintain its tight focus on a select few people to highlight its destructive path, as well as minimize the chance of overusing its own contrasts. The consequence of this though disproportionately highlights the actions of certain characters, giving the appearance of certain children embodying the classic image of The Antagonist™ more than others. The story wants to show Shizuka, Azuma, and Marina as victims of the same generalized imposition, and it does, though some of the narrative's later attempts to do this pass as rapid overcorrections moreso than intended.
(Credit to Saurabh Singh)
Takopii’s Original Sin never could have fully broached the broad subject of violence in only six episodes. There’s perhaps even something to be said for the fact that it didn’t necessarily delve far enough into the particulars of the how or when the parents and children concluded that they should be violent themselves. Less physically gruesome viscera, more mentally gruesome viscera. Would the story be stronger if it had done so? That possibility exists, at least in the abstract. But when you cannot settle for addressing the whole of an issue, sometimes the best approach is to hyperfocus on one element in particular, and as the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words. The irony is that the story, in a sense, wounded itself so that it could give the subject the justice that it deserved. Considering the story’s ending, there’s a bizarre poeticism to that. The series made its choice – children as abuse victims processing that abuse through inflicting abuse, on each other and themselves alike, as coping mechanism.
The Act of Killing made the point of saying that if real people could slaughter hundreds of thousands simply for being suspected communists or sympathizers, and that the violence they committed could be rationalized as acceptable, then there might be no depths to which people will not sink. Yet even in the midst of its examination of “humanity rejection,” it also made the case through one of its participants, Anwar Congo, that not only is an end to the personal glorification of violence possible, but that it can seem like magic unto itself. That, itself, is also human. Takopii’s Original Sin shows bluntly how despairingly grotesque violence is inflicted, internalized, and inflicted again, a cycle that can only break through understanding and a seeming miracle taking place, however it manifests. If a naïve pink octopus alien can understand that everyone loses in violence like this, especially children, then maybe things don’t have to be so bleak after all.